Later this month, Influenza experts from all over the world will gather in the Crick Worldwide Influenza Center in London to transfer data in a multi-day effort, led by the World Health Organization, to decide which specific viruses should direct the flu port of winter .
For the time being, the WHO does not know or the US government Representatives will show up. Whether they do that can have an impact on the composition, and ultimately the effectiveness, of flu vaccines in the northern hemisphere and then.
The decision on which flu vaccine institutions are recommended for manufacturers is normally taken by the heads of Seven those influenza cooperating centers and three important regulatory laboratories. Traditionally, US government agencies have two of the 10 votes in the Chamber; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is one of the cooperating centers and the Food and Drug Administration is one of the essential regulatory laboratories.
But with the Trump administration planning to withdraw the US from the WHO and its ban on government employees who interact with the Global Health Agency, it is currently unknown whether there will be an American presence during this year’s meeting. If the CDC and the FDA are not present, it would leave the United States at the table without a voice, or the power to influence the species advised by the group of flu vaccine manufacturers to include in the 2025-2026 Northern hemisphere flu vaccines.
“The vaccine assistance meeting will take place,” said Maria van Kerkhove, acting director of the WHO ministerie of epidemic and Pandemic Threat Management, on Wednesday during a press conference. “The American CDC … are invited. We don’t know if they will come. “
The Ministry of Health and Human Services, which supervises both the CDC and the FDA, did not respond to questions from Stat about whether the agencies can send teams to the meeting. It takes months to make flu vaccines, to bottles and send, and therefore the experts who are responsible for selecting the vaccinsts to try to try to assess what the worst threats will be next flu season, while the current is still raging. A second meeting, in September, repeats this process for the southern hemisphere of winter vaccines.
Kanta Subbarao, a flu virologist who has attended many of these meetings, described them as very intense and the work as ‘super hard’.
The CDC has long had a central part in this effort and viruses not only analyze from the United States, but also from America and even further. “Many countries send their viruses to the [CDC] For characterization, “Subbarao told Stat in an interview. “As I understand, the other cooperating centers reach out and try to fill in the gaps. But it will be a big hole. “
“If decisions are made with 30% less data, or 40% less data, that is not good,” she said. Subbarrao, who is now teaching at Laval University in Quebec City, was withdrawn last year as director of the WHO cooperation center for reference and research into Influenza in Melbourne, Australia, the position that gained its access to the vaccination composition meeting.
Not having the expertise of the CDCs and the FDA at the table can lead to less effective vaccines next winter and confusion for the companies that make these critical products. Furthermore, without participating in the WHO-led meeting, the vision of the FDA on what is happening, flu, will be less clear in the world when the experts come together at the beginning of March to choose the tensions that manufacturers make flu vaccines for the US Market. The FDA usually endorses the selections made by the WHO-conducted meeting.
There are even questions among some experts about whether the FDA experts will be allowed by the administration to satisfy, since many advisory committees have canceled their meetings since the new administration took office.
Van Kerkhove said the CDC stopped contributing influenza data to two WHO-managed databases, Pulse And LiquidOn January 24, a few days before President Trump publicly ordered US government employees to stop all interactions with the Global Health Agency. Data from earlier in the flu season were shared, but in reality the people who make the decisions about the vaccine composition scan the data to the thread to try to make the best possible decisions, Subbarao said.
During the five-day meeting, which is running this year from 24 to 28 February, teams of the WHO-Griep Collaboration and the FDA, Great Britain Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration Pore about reports on thousands of Influenza A Viruss, H1N1 and H3N2, as well as the flu B -lines B/Victoria and B/Yamagata, to determine which of countless versions of each the most important source of disease is the next winter in the northern hemisphere. (Flu vaccines used in the United States no longer include a B/Yamagata component, because it is assumed that that line of virus has become extinct during the COVID-19 Pandemie.)
In addition to looking at genetic changes in the circulating viruses, they will study reports about whether the changes that viruses actually avoid, the immunity caused by the current versions of the vaccines – that would update the vaccinstams would Require – and will hear reviews of mathematical modelers about which tensions will probably be the most important villains in the coming season.
That work on the choices for seasonal flu vaccine takes three days. Before it starts, however, a day is spent on assessing flu viruses circulating in birds and animals, work led by scientists of two flu cooperating centers that focus on these viruses and present data on the data that are currently becoming Checked as pandemic threats. (One of those cooperating centers is located in St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, TN; The other is in Russia.)
That part of the meeting determines whether flu vaccine manufacturers are provided with new candidate vaccine viruses – CVVs – for H5N1, H9N2 or other subtypes of bird flu viruses. Those CVVs can be used to make vaccine doses for strategic stocks, such as those who have the US government, or it can be the starting material if a pandemic started and vaccine had to be made quickly.
On the fifth day, The results of the deliberations will be presented to vaccine manufacturers, regulatory authorities and other interested parties.
Influenza scientists who are familiar with this process are struggling to think about how the voltage selection will function without the involvement of the CDC in particular.
“It was always a challenge to try to make these decisions for the season so far. And it just became much more challenging, given the uncertainty about whether or not the US will participate, ”said Danuta Skowronski, a flu expert at the BC Center for Disease Control in Vancouver, Canada. “It is an influential country and not to have their viruses and their collected expertise – it is hard to say that that would not be felt.”
The uncertainty about the plans of the Trump administration comes at a time when it seems that the influenza A viruses H1N1 and H3N2 undergo important changes that can extract the effectiveness of the vaccines that have been designed to protect against them, Skowronski said. She and colleagues reported these changes in some viruses in Canada in one Recent report In the online magazine Eurosurveillance; It will be important for the people who select the Vaccinstammen to know if other countries also see them and how widespread viruses that contain the changes are.
“Some of the mutations were seen in previous years, but they are extinct. So … we want to know: have they found the legs they need to make dominance apply? “She said.” It would be in favor of everyone at the moment to have more information instead of less. ”
“You know, it’s always a gamble,” said Skowronski about the selection process of the tribe. “And if you are going to take a risk, you want it to be so informed that a risk assessment is possible.”